The Education Futures Collaboration There are pockets of innovation, evidence-based practice and excellence in teaching and learning, nationally and internationally, but if educators are to succeed in a time of global financial uncertainty and educational change, then we must act together to join these pockets up within a specialist environment, which connects us and our ideas and aggregates our networks for the betterment of our profession and the learners.
The Education Futures Collaboration provides an e-infrastructure, which both connects together the isolated initiatives and creates national and international development capacity, allowing for knowledge exchange and co-creation between educators, teacher educators, policy-makers and academics nationally and internationally. Staff from a wide range of universities and schools are already involved in the activities. An analysis of users of the Education Communities platform from the two year pilot stage shows engagement of over 800 educators from over 140 UK schools, universities and colleges; over 70 universities outside of the UK; over 100 charities, companies and education consultancies. The Collaboration notes parallel work undertaken in health to build and quality assure the research base and make available to practitioners through, for example, the Cochrane Collaboration, the Map of Medicine and in the UK, NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence).